Many documents contain black and white textual content as well as valuable color information, such as photos, logos, stamps and other color markings. Examples of such documents include invoices, medical records, insurance claims and the like. The traditional process involved in digitizing these documents is to scan them as black and white. While this process creates a highly compressed image and small file size, all color information is lost.
Alternatively, such documents are scanned as color resulting in a substantially larger file than the equivalent black and white version but retaining all color information. As will be appreciated, when documents contain just black and white or gray textual elements, the additional color information is not useful. In known systems that scan as color, a manual review process must be used to convert these digitized color images to black and white for storage and bandwidth optimizations.
With the foregoing problems and concerns in mind, it is the general object of the present invention to provide a system and method for identifying and classifying color regions. In particular, the present invention provides a system that automatically converts a digitized color document to black and white when no useful color elements are detected.